Oliver Payne and Nick Relph

Comma, Pregnant Pause, the new video by British duo Oliver Payne and Nick Relph (commissioned for the 2004–05 Carnegie International, and now on view at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise), could have been written by Samuel Beckett. The work’s two protagonists wear Scream-style masks and, even stranger, matching cell-phone costumes—not shiny silver flip-tops, but dingy, puke-green models. They slouch side by side on stools, as captions and an audio track deliver a circular dialogue that skips around like a scratched CD. Behind them, Mac screensavers and unimpressive computer graphics shift and swirl, like a decorative corporate landscape that seems removed from time and place. The characters wait, they sit, they face this way, then that, without any real movement, as if everything is so immediately accessible, or even pre-programmed, that stasis has become second nature. Overstimulated and underexcited, our stoner heroes appear unfocused, inhabiting a realm in which dispersed attention is the norm. Guitar strums and rock countdowns, like the (disordered) opening “3-5-0-1-2-5-Go!” of Joy Division’s “Warsaw,” play with no follow-through—just anticlimactic silence. At one point, the screen reads ROCK MUSIC, while the speakers emit nothing. The mantra “Gotta catch ’em all! Pokemon!” sounds every so often, a reminder that consumption is the modus operandi here. Rather than reiterating Marxist lines of critique, however, Payne and Relph offer a situation in which advanced consumption is taken as a given, the lowest denominator of another order.